


I Am Here

by greyvvardenfell



Series: OC-tober 2020 [2]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:48:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26928388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyvvardenfell/pseuds/greyvvardenfell
Summary: Losing his mother was the final nail in the coffin of Adam's anger and aggression. Finally, he lets himself mourn.
Relationships: Fenris/Male Hawke
Series: OC-tober 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974934
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	I Am Here

Adam’s limbs dragged like anchors as he climbed the dirty stairs out of Quentin’s lair. Ever the guardsman, Aveline stayed behind, summoning a handful of her minions to clean up the area, but Anders and Isabela flanked him, neither speaking, their concern nearly palpable in the thick air.

Gaspard followed only reluctantly, keeping well away from any lightning Adam might summon to fry him to the same sort of crisp Quentin had become. He begged off as soon as they reached the entrance of the foundry, tossing apologies over his shoulder and claiming that he needed his own time to grieve now that his obligation had been fulfilled. Adam only stared at him, gray eyes empty, the stuttered words that insisted upon spilling from the man’s lips falling on ears unwilling to hear them. The silence soon stretched into uncomfortable territory and Gaspard scuttled into the dark before Adam could snap.

Both Lowtown and Hightown passed in a blur. Anders had suggested the shorter route through the city slums, but Isabela shook her head. “Gamlen,” she murmured. Nothing good could come of him stopping them now and demanding explanations. If anything could stir Adam from catatonia to rage, it would be his uncle’s accusatory excuses.

Somehow, Adam recognized the marble pillars of his estate as they passed. Anders, with whom he had never been close, attempted a brotherly shoulder pat as Isabela unlocked the door with the key she fished out of Adam’s pocket. Through a haze of blank incomprehension, Adam wondered if he should thank her for not simply picking the lock.

Bodahn greeted him cheerfully, as usual, but the grin fell from his face as the despondency around Adam caught up to him. Isabela led him up the stairs while Anders stayed behind, fingers running through his long blond hair as he explained what had happened. Adam heard Bodahn gasp, then the scratches of a pen as he scrawled a hasty note for Gamlen and dispatched Sandal with it, before Isabela shut the door.

She urged him to remove his blood-spattered robes and put on his dressing gown, for once keeping her lewd comments to herself. Adam responded mechanically, shedding his clothing as though she wasn’t even there. He could taste his own failure, bitter on his tongue, as every harsh word he had ever spat at his mother echoed in his ears. He sat heavily on the edge of his bed, searching the opposite wall with unseeing eyes. Isabela joined him, resting her arm over his narrow shoulders, and still he did not respond.

The sound of footsteps ascending the stairs did not stir him either. Isabela met Anders’ gaze as he opened the door to Adam’s room, rubbing his neck anxiously. 

“He needs… someone,” Anders said as Isabela stood to join him after tucking a loose strand of Adam's hair behind his ear. They stepped into the hall together, leaving him to his grief.

“He needs Fenris,” she muttered. 

“You’ll certainly have more luck convincing him than I would.”

“What? Are you two not on the same page? I had no idea!”

Anders rolled his eyes, but the sight of Adam’s defeated posture through the crack in the door kept him from sniping back. “Go see him. I’ll tell Varric and the others.”

———

Fenris’s mansion was an eyesore at best. Most of it had been ignored for years, as he seemed to have taken everything he thought he would need into the study when he first moved in. Isabela assumed he still used some of the other rooms for something, but she had never seen him anywhere else inside the massive house.

She found him in the study now, sorting chipped dishes into stacks. The bed had been stripped of its threadbare linens, the rucksack with which he had come to Kirkwall stuffed full and waiting beside the door.

“Are you going somewhere?” Isabela asked by way of greeting, leaning against the door jamb with a furrow in her brow.

Fenris startled. “Isabela,” he said shortly. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Evidently not. What’s all this?”

“I’m…” 

“You’re…?”

“There is nothing left for me in this city,” Fenris grumbled, willing his gaze to neutrality as he rose to meet her. “It is long past time I moved on.”

Isabela barked out an incredulous laugh. “And here I thought you’d been settling right in with society’s elite.” Her amusement fell away as Fenris turned his back: he wasn’t quick enough to hide the flash of pain that crossed his face. “Oh.”

“There is nothing for me here,” he repeated heavily, staring at the floor.

“What about you and—?”

“It’s over.”

“Did something happen and you didn’t tell me? You know I always appreciate the gory details.”

Fenris hunched his shoulders and drove his fingernails into his palms. Even without his gauntlets, they were sharp enough to bite. “The same thing that always happens. Danarius took everything from me, even…” He shook his head. “Adam— Hawke, he— he deserves better than what I can give him.”

With anyone else, Isabela would have offered a hug, or at least a hand to hold. But touch, however tender, always seemed more likely to cause pain than comfort with Fenris. Waves of his heartache lapped at the edges of the room; even the mansion wasn’t large enough to hold the weight of the love he had turned away.

After several beats of silence, Fenris straightened, seeking his own comfort in the shell of bluntness and anger that had sustained him for so long. The set of his dark brows as he looked at Isabela sent a flicker of unease through her calf muscles, a warning to run in case things got out of hand. Fenris had always been intimidating: tall for an elf, with his shock of white hair and the glow of lyrium beneath his skin setting him apart whether he wanted it or not, but when his eyes flashed like that, even people who considered themselves his friends understood how he could kill so many, so brutally, and emerged unscathed.

“Why are you here, Isabela,” he growled, more accusation than question.

She took a breath and squared her shoulders. “Hawke’s mother is dead. A crazed blood mage kidnapped her because she looked like his dead wife. He killed her and used her body in some ritual to try to rebuild the woman.”

Stunned, Fenris could only stare, the intensity of his gaze fading into concern. “I don’t know what to—” 

Isabela held up her hand to stop him. “I’m here because he needs you.”

“I won’t be of much comfort to him.”

“Look, you’re closer to him than anyone he has left. He lost his sister, his brother, his mother, everyone. He doesn’t need to lose you too.”

“We never should have—”

“You did. Whether you ‘should have’ or not is irrelevant now.” Isabela folded her arms across her chest. “I’ve seen the way you two moon over each other. You’re special to him, and he to you. That must still be true.”

“It shouldn’t be. I— I told him— I left.” He gestured at his bare bed, the packed rucksack. “I’m leaving.”

“Well, Hawke needs you,” she repeated. “Go back to him and figure it out.”

“I can’t.”

“Will you ever stop running, Fenris?” Isabela asked abruptly, raising an eyebrow in challenge.

His eyes narrowed. “Will you?”

She laughed, but couldn’t stop herself shifting away from him. Even if Fenris didn’t know what she’d done, his retort hit too close. 

When she offered no other response, Fenris turned away again, back to the fire smouldering in the grate. He rested his hand on the marble mantle and stared into the flames, fingers curling unconsciously into fists. Whether he was imagining Adam or Danarius, Isabela couldn’t say. After a moment, he let out a long breath. 

“He won’t see me,” he said quietly.

“I’m willing to bet otherwise.”

Still he hesitated, though he glanced at the door. “I don’t want him to see me.”

“Yes, you do. If you didn’t, you’d have been long gone by now. I know I would’ve been.”

The same eyes capable of such vicious hatred looked at her now, full of fear and sadness. “Please don’t tell him that I was— What I was planning to do.”

“I won’t. I promise.” 

———

If Adam was surprised to see Fenris in his bedroom again, he didn’t show it. Bodahn had not questioned his presence either, merely nodding towards the stairs after he finally worked up the courage to stop pacing outside the estate’s front door. 

Fenris’s legs felt wrong as he crossed the plush carpet, hesitating before he sat down. He tried to ignore the building tension, swallowing around the words he couldn’t quite piece together. Adam offered nothing, no derision or pleasure or discomfort or ease. As though he had been hollowed out by the loss, he sat bowed forward, rubbing one thumb over the jut of his wrist where an old scar had toughened the skin, barely moving, barely blinking, barely present at all.

After a long, awkward silence, Fenris finally cleared his throat enough to draw a proper breath. “I don’t know what to say,” he murmured, brushing his fingers over Adam’s arm. “But I am here.”

Adam spared him a glance, shifting his gaze as though it hurt to do so. Fenris’s heart broke to see the depths of the pain spiraling through those steel-gray eyes. Gingerly, he moved his hand to rest on Adam’s thigh, a step closer to the intimacy they had so recently shared.

Adam leaned into the touch and Fenris nearly flinched back, stopping himself only when the reality of where he was, and why, dug in its heels. 

“They’re all gone,” Adam said, so heavy with anguish he could barely speak. “I failed them all, one by one.”

“Adam…”

“There was so much I could’ve done, so many times I should’ve stepped in, been the brother or the son they expected me to be.”

“I…” Fenris paused. “I could tell you otherwise, but such assurances would likely sound empty.”

“I don’t want you to have to do that.”

“I would if it would help.”

Adam’s sigh caught on the tears in his throat. “I know.”

He hadn’t cried for Malcolm. He hadn’t cried for the scores of Lothering villagers cut down by the darkspawn, or Lothering itself, or even for Bethany. He hadn’t cried when Carver coughed blood onto the unfeeling stone of the Deep Roads as Warden Stroud hauled him into the darkness. 

That night, Adam cried. 

After years of shutting his grief away long enough for it to boil over into anger, he curled into Fenris’s embrace and sobbed desperate, painful tears into his chest, refusing to allow himself even the comfort of a steady heartbeat. The soothing pressure of Fenris’s hand rubbing circles between his shoulder blades clashed with every breath he gasped until, eventually, his pain retreated.

———

Even as he shifted Adam’s head from the crook of his arm to the pillow, Fenris thought he should stay. The man’s descent into dreams had been hard-fought, only acceptable after his grief wrung him out like a cloak after a cloudburst. Judging by the darkness outside the Hawke estate’s tall windows, it was either very late or very early, and Fenris cursed his weakness with every step he took away from the ivy-covered manse. 

But that bedroom, seeing Adam’s angular features softened with sleep again, added regret to the paths of pain Danarius’s lyrium had already traced down his body. _I cannot offer him what he deserves,_ Fenris reminded himself harshly as he made his way back to his own neighborhood. _He needs to be loved and I cannot love him._

The ache of that thought blurred the near-identical Hightown buildings together until Fenris dipped beneath the curtain of greenery he had allowed to grow over the entrance of his own mansion. The door swung shut behind him; he slumped against it, scowling at the cracked tiles beneath his feet. This was what he was: an unwelcome intruder on the peace of a world not made for him. He had no place in the life he so desperately sought, neither a slave nor a free man yet carrying the burdens of both. All he had, if what he’d done tonight was enough to salvage it, was the space he had claimed, and been welcomed into, at the side of Adam Hawke.

Fenris pushed himself upright and crossed the foyer to ascend the staircase blackened by the battle that had won him this place. It still made him smile to remember the ferocity with which Adam had attacked the spirits Danarius summoned, the snarl on his face lit by Fenris’s own lyrium glow and the purple-white lightning that arced from each fingertip. 

As he passed, he hooked the strap of his rucksack and dragged it over to the fireplace. The flames had long sunk into the wood, but a quick strike of his gauntlet against the shard of flint he kept on the mantle woke them again. In their flickering warmth, Fenris untied the rucksack and dumped its contents onto the rug in front of the fire.

All the better to see what he could start putting back.


End file.
